Gabrielle's Reviews > Mockingbird

Something I find endlessly fascinating with dystopias and post-apocalyptic fiction is that very often, the authors show the readers what they are afraid we, as a civilization, will lose, through the changes they imagine the world to have gone through. Reading “Mockingbird” showed me that Walter Tevis was afraid of losing intellectual curiosity and physical intimacy. Maybe I loved the book because I am also afraid of losing those things to a world that is turning culture into sound-bites and human relationships into commodities…

Written in 1980, there are clear echoes of “Fahrenheit 451” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and “Brave New World" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) in this work of philosophical sci-fi. I did a little digging, and Tevis was also sick with the cancer that would eventually kill him when he wrote this book, which is probably why the theme of death, both of wanting it and struggling against it, play such an important part in this strange story. Distressed by the rate at which literacy in his students was declining, he combined that sense of an approaching end with the idea of a world where no one reads, and voilà.

Several hundreds of years in the future, humans no longer know how to read, and no longer have children. All their needs are provided for by robots who keep the great machine of society running, albeit, very weirdly, and most humans pop pills like candies simply to make it through the day. In this bizarre future, Spofforth is the most sophisticated robot ever built, a Make Nine: fully conscious, highly intelligent, almost human, but programmed differently from the other robots of his make. He is the only one who cannot kill himself, as the others Make Nines have. Despairing of his situation, he accidentally finds a single human, Paul Bentley, who taught himself to read, and brings him to the “university” where he works. But Bentley soon meets a woman who has rejected the drugs everyone else is so eager to consume, and teaches her to read as well – with very surprizing consequences.

There is a lot to unpack in this book, but mostly, what I found there is Tevis’ deep love of art and culture and his sadness at the indifference with which it is often met. The robots think they are offering humans a perfect life by removing all effort and discomfort from their lives, but they also accidentally remove life’s very meaning by making them numb, leading them to a desperation they don’t even have words for anymore. Perfection ceases to be perfect if that’s all there is. But truly, what makes this book stand apart is that there is hope amidst the bleak settings the characters have to live in. If you have books, love and a cat, you can figure it out. Post-apocalyptic fiction is rarely soothing, but strangely, this book soothed me.

If you have only read “The Queen’s Gambit” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), do yourself a favor and check out more of this man’s work: it is completely different in tone and subject matter, but it touches similarly deep and authentic nerves.